Thursday, November 13, 2008

Another good thing about blogging is that when you get of a bit of l'esprit d'escalier, you can always put it in another post. Weeks after what will be forever remembered in Thought Experiments legend as the October of the Transhumanists, obscure pro-death arguments are still throwing themselves at me. The Wurzels provided one, now Vakulynchuk provides another.

Vakulynchuk, as the well-informed readers of Thought Experiements will not need telling, is the Stalin-tached rabble-rouser in Eisenstein's classic Commie propaganda flick The Battleship Potemkin. I watched it recently when suffering from a brief but debilitating bout of food-poisoning. (When you're ill and there's nothing better to do, The Battleship Potemkin is the kind of worthy film you can force yourself to watch.) It is notable chiefly for two things: the famous Odessa steps sequence and, amusingly, the apparently arbitrary insertion of unnecessary captions, especially at the beginning (my favourite is "Boiling soup" - I defy even the most reverential film buff not to hoot between chin-strokes when that little beauty pops up).

Anyway, Vakulynchuk leads the crew of the Potemkin in their mutiny against the cruel Czarist officers, and is killed along the way. His brave sacrifice inspires the others, ultimately to glorious victory, much in the manner of other revolutionary martyrs such as Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, and Michael Hutchence.

Which leads us to such questions as: in a transhuman world, what do we do for our martyrs? Must all revolutionary heroes be like Castro and grow old enough to witness the full, dismal extent of their failure? Or will death be so unthinkable a price to pay when immortality is on offer that nobody will ever be prepared to lay down their precious life for anything? I don't know. I'm just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

Brit, ref undead revolutionaries, who said the cigar smoking old twerp is still alive, he could be like Chuck in the final scenes in El Cid, bunged onto a nag with a pole up his arse, or a Polish hooker.Could you put that question about martyrs to the trannies again, this time in Janet and John writing, there's been no response so far.

In a perfect transhumanist utopia I would create a backup clone to martyr himself for me by watching Battleship Potemkin on my behalf. Then I'd get him to martyr himself further by reading Proust and Jane Austen and all those massive Central European classics Milan Kundera is always banging on about in his 'Art of the Novel' type books. I would keep him locked in a room so I could steal his knowledge and feign cultivation to the outside world. I meanwhile would sit around in my underpants drinking Coca Cola through a curly straw and watching 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here'.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.